My Strategy to Affording College During A Generation of Student Debt

If you plan to enter college soon, then you are probably on the lookout for ways to fund your education. Your first thought may be about student loans. While student loans are helpful, they place you in deep debt when you graduate. If you want to skip the debt, then you should start thinking about scholarships.

Many students often do not take the time to fill out scholarship applications because they jump to student loans for help. This can be a costly mistake. Contrary to student loans, these awards do not have to be paid back. You could say that they allow you to attend school without any strings attached.

There are thousands of opportunities out there, and many of them are low competition, so you have a good chance at winning them. Plenty of college students have succeeded in securing funding this way. Want to know more? Check out the rest of this article to get a better understanding of their potential.

How Much Do Scholarships Pay For?

Well, it depends on the scholarship.

There are full ride opportunities which pay for 100% of your tuition, and there are awards for as little as $500 to over $50,000. The whole point is variety. There are thousands of different value rewards that are awarded for just as many reasons.

While a $500 scholarship sounds like a joke, these are actually important opportunities to take advantage of. These come with less competition, so your chances of success are greatly improved. You may be thinking a $500 award is a waste of time because it is small. This is not true! There is no limit to the number of scholarships you can qualify for. Multiple $500 awards can add up to full tuition if you put in the work!

Long story short, their financial potential is unlimited. You can cover either all, half, or any amount of your tuition. It all depends on how much work you put into searching for opportunities.

How to Find Scholarships

While you may think that scholarships are hard to find, they are actually quite easy to locate. Scholarships are not a secret, and they are open to any and all students.

If you have never looked for scholarships before, one easy way to start is to go online and search around. It is likely that you will notice a lot of the popular awards from big companies and names such as Coca-Cola or Bill Gates. These scholarships come with more competition, so you may want to focus on smaller, lesser-known scholarships since this increases your odds of winning (as mentioned earlier).

In order to find these small scholarships, you need to dig a bit deeper. There are helpful websites that provide lists of scholarships with all the relevant details, deadline dates, eligibility requirements, and more. These resources provide exposure to thousands of opportunities, but it takes a bit of work to find the right, low-competition offers. Searching for an opportunity that fits into a certain niche is a good tip since there are plenty of applications with special requirements that limit the field of competition greatly.

Another way to search for scholarships is to talk to your high school and college counselors. Your counselors are information avenues towards scholarships. For instance, your high school counselor may know about some good local offers. Next, you should look into local organizations and businesses. You will find that many businesses offer scholarships without advertising them, so they are not as well known.

Final Thoughts

Finding the scholarships is just one part of the process. Each application requires something different, but they all require you to stand out in some way. This is a crucial step because a quality application is the difference between success or failure. If you fail on a scholarship application, then you wasted your time!

The scholarship process has often been compared to a numbers game. It is all about increasing your chances of success. If you are going to fill out an application, then you need to verify if it is worth the time in the first place. The ideal approach is to fill out a high number of low competition applications as possible.

Scholarships are wonderful options, and their potential is gargantuan. There is a whole lot to gain from putting in serious time and effort on applications, but there is even more to gain by approaching applications intelligently. Think of it this way. A hard scholarship effort today can save years of student loan debt troubles down the road!

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The Bottom

You made it all the way to the bottom! Thanks so much for reading.
Did you know that The Bottom is the name of a town on the island of Saba, in the Caribbean? I went there on a trip once.
The other bottoms I think about are my own bottom, and the bottom of the champagne bottle. Often when I find the bottom of the champagne bottle, my own bottom grows. Funny, that.

Thanks for reading!

- Anne

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